Shapiro Says Chances Good Super Committee Will Recommend Spectrum Auctions
Chances appear very good that a spectrum sale will be part of any legislation recommended by the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, CEA President Gary Shapiro said in an interview on C-SPAN’s The Communicators, scheduled to be broadcast over the weekend. Shapiro was asked repeatedly about recommendations the group made in an Oct. 27 letter to the super committee (http://xrl.us/bmhuym). Shapiro said the likelihood the committee will recommend spectrum auctions is “well over 90 percent.”
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"Whether the super committee is going to resolve the bigger issues of the country nobody knows at this point,” Shapiro said. “If they do, [spectrum] is almost certainly going to be in there. If they don’t, we have a lot of other issues as a nation. But along the way, this is a solution that helps cut the deficit and spurs economic growth.”
CEA doesn’t want to get rid of broadcast TV, but holding voluntary, incentive auctions of the spectrum as recommended by the FCC is critical, Shapiro said. “There’s government spectrum, which may be available, and there’s the broadcasters’ spectrum. Fewer than 10 percent of American homes are now relying on that free over-the-air broadcast signal.” Shapiro said of the broadcast band, “there’s plenty of spectrum available.”
Shapiro wants an update of the tax system to encourage high-tech companies to bring more money back from overseas. One trillion dollars a year is in play, he said.
"We have 2,000 tech companies and many of them do business overseas and have money which they just leave there,” he said. “The United States has this policy of first of all of having the second highest corporate tax in the developed world and second of all taxing all international sales which almost no other country does.” Current tax policies are bad for the U.S., he said. Companies are effectively encouraged to invest money overseas, he said. “They build factories there. They hire people. It makes no sense."
Shapiro also said many CEA members support making the research and development tax credit permanent. “It’s a political issue, frankly,” he said. “It’s temporary and that way the members of Congress that do it could always come back to the tech community and say we'll do this for you. It’s unfortunate because it doesn’t allow the predictability you need as a business planner.”
Shapiro said CEA views copyright, patents and software protections as “very, very important” but does not support the PROTECT IP and Stop Online Piracy Acts. Both would mean “basically shutting down the Internet in a very large way,” he said. Both bills wrongly target websites, he said. Pirate websites are “horrible and wrong and ought to be stopped,” he said. But the bill would give private parties the ability to shut down websites “without any process protections, without government,” while creating “new private rights of action.” This year, the federal government shut down 50,000 websites in one incident because of a single child pornographer, he said. “Those are the kind of mistakes you want to avoid,” he said. “You want to avoid legitimate businesses from being shutdown without process protections. … These bills are good but let’s modify them.”